Dallas taxpayers might never know how much money the city lost at the McCommas Bluff Landfill due to sloppy bookkeeping that made it all but impossible to detect simple errors — much less the possibility of fraud.

In an audit released last month, City Auditor Craig Kinton identified potential losses of at least $1.1 million over an 11-year period.

But that figure is “extremely conservative,” council member Scott Griggs said Monday. And even though city management is examining losses at the landfill, it probably won’t be possible to ever come up with a clear understanding of how much the city lost, he said.

“The shop was so poorly run and mismanaged that we don’t even have enough information available to go back and accurately determine how much the loss is. It’s just going to be about the assumptions we use,” Griggs said.

The landfill is a significant source of revenue for the city, with commercial waste haulers and individuals paying for its use.

The audit showed that there was very little control over the flow of cash or waste at the landfill. Employees who handled cash could also enter and void transactions. Commercial waste trucks were assigned numbers that reflected the truck’s empty weight.

But drivers could, and apparently did, use any truck number they pleased. So a driver, upon entering the landfill, might use the number for the heaviest truck in a company’s fleet and shave some cost off a load.

Kinton’s audit only suggests that these things could have happened. It does not positively conclude they did happen or identify the companies that may have been responsible.

A police investigation prompted by a request from Kinton was dropped without any charges being filed. Days before the audit was released, City Manager Mary Suhm demoted longtime sanitation director Mary Nix.

Under questioning from council members Monday, Kinton said many years had passed since the city last audited operations at the sanitation department.

Council member Tennell Atkins appeared troubled by that, noting the department is a major revenue source.

If a department as significant as sanitation is going without regular audits, what does that say about the rest of the city, Atkins asked.

“Do we have enough staff to audit those departments? Do we have the safety valve to audit those departments?” Atkins asked.

Kinton answered that he believes the auditing department is “significantly below where we should be” in terms of staff. The auditor’s office is currently budgeted for 18 positions, down from 28 before the recession, he said.

Griggs called for management to answer problems at the landfill with clear metrics for correcting problems. For example, the city should reduce manual entries of traffic into and out of the landfill from an astonishing 60-plus percent to less than 1 percent. Manual entries of traffic are more susceptible to error and fraud than computerized entries — a problem the audit clearly identified.

“There are more controls on the number of ketchup packets in a McDonald’s than at McCommas with cash and the huge volume going through, and we certainly need to get those controls in place,” he said.

Assistant city manager Forest Turner reiterated the city’s intention to correct problems at the landfill.

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